Best Verb of the Year

Groppeling

Editors' Picks

Talking about the weather is a time-honored way to avoid awkward pauses but sometimes it gets a little old. So how are you supposed to make chatting about the weather hipper and more fun? Why, you use a wacky term, of course! Enter groppeling. When the valley's meteorologists introduced the public to the term "groppel" last spring to describe the hail/snow crossbreed that kept falling from the sky, the term caught on like wildfire. Soon people had turned it into a verb and were casually dropping it while standing in line at their favorite coffeeshop. There hasn't been such a quick acceptance of a weather term since the micro-burst heyday of the 1990s or even the dust devil hullaballoo of the 1920s.